In our province, proponents of special education in universities simply deny that all children can be included in regular classes, even in the face of concrete examples that inclusion can work.
Support from Research
Another myth is that research supports traditional special education. We looked at some of the research used to support special education and found that it was poorly disigned, poorly interpreted and not relevant to existing reality. In fact, research today shows that it supports integration rather than segregation for students with a disability.
Parents should question the quality and validity of education research in general. Science is not objective and research experiments are designed to produce the results the researcher wants to produce. Experiments are carried out by people to get degrees, jobs, promotions or professional status. In addition, education is an intensely personal interaction between people whose moods and attitudes vary from minute to minute. The use of adaptations of scientific methods designed to study inanimate things seems inadequate for the study of education.
The Holes in the Cascade Theory
Die Löcher in der Kaskaden Theorie
Special education generally supports the model of a continuum of learning environments from total segregation to total integration in the regular classroom.
Pupils are supposed to progress along this continuum towards the regular classroom, which they are supposed to reach eventually but never do. This is the Cascade model, which it would be more appropriate to call the “anywhere but in the regular classroom” model. It is incredibly wasteful because the many different learning environments must be staffed by special education personnel and pupils must be brought in from far and wide to provide the required numbers at each level. The real figures show that most of the movement in the cascade is from less segregated environments to more segregated environments and that it is unusual for a pupil to progress successfully from a segregated environment to a regular classroom.